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Extracting macroscopic information from Web links

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  • Mike Thelwall

Abstract

Much has been written about the potential and pitfalls of macroscopic Web‐based link analysis, yet there have been no studies that have provided clear statistical evidence that any of the proposed calculations can produce results over large areas of the Web that correlate with phenomena external to the Internet. This article attempts to provide such evidence through an evaluation of Ingwersen's (1998) proposed external Web Impact Factor (WIF) for the original use of the Web: the interlinking of academic research. In particular, it studies the case of the relationship between academic hyperlinks and research activity for universities in Britain, a country chosen for its variety of institutions and the existence of an official government rating exercise for research. After reviewing the numerous reasons why link counts may be unreliable, it demonstrates that four different WIFs do, in fact, correlate with the conventional academic research measures. The WIF delivering the greatest correlation with research rankings was the ratio of Web pages with links pointing at research‐based pages to faculty numbers. The scarcity of links to electronic academic papers in the data set suggests that, in contrast to citation analysis, this WIF is measuring the reputations of universities and their scholars, rather than the quality of their publications.

Suggested Citation

  • Mike Thelwall, 2001. "Extracting macroscopic information from Web links," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 52(13), pages 1157-1168.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:52:y:2001:i:13:p:1157-1168
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.1182
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    Cited by:

    1. Enrique Orduña-Malea & José-Antonio Ontalba-Ruipérez, 2013. "Selective linking from social platforms to university websites: a case study of the Spanish academic system," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 95(2), pages 593-614, May.
    2. Liwen Vaughan & Margaret E. I. Kipp & Yijun Gao, 2007. "Why are Websites co-linked? The case of Canadian universities," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 72(1), pages 81-92, July.
    3. Mike Thelwall, 2012. "Journal impact evaluation: a webometric perspective," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 92(2), pages 429-441, August.
    4. Junping Qiu & Jingquan Chen & Zhi Wang, 2004. "An analysis of backlink counts and Web Impact Factorsfor Chinese university websites," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 60(3), pages 463-473, August.
    5. Patrick Kenekayoro & Kevan Buckley & Mike Thelwall, 2014. "Automatic classification of academic web page types," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(2), pages 1015-1026, November.
    6. Liwen Vaughan & Guozhu Wu, 2004. "Links to commercial websites as a source of business information," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 60(3), pages 487-496, August.
    7. Liwen Vaughan & Esteban Romero-Frías, 2012. "Exploring Web keyword analysis as an alternative to link analysis: a multi-industry case," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 93(1), pages 217-232, October.
    8. José-Antonio Ontalba-Ruipérez & Enrique Orduna-Malea & Adolfo Alonso-Arroyo, 2016. "Identifying institutional relationships in a geographically distributed public health system using interlinking and co-authorship methods," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 106(3), pages 1167-1191, March.
    9. Judit Bar-Ilan, 2004. "A microscopic link analysis of academic institutions within a country — the case of Israel," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 59(3), pages 391-403, March.
    10. Bar-Ilan Judit, 2004. "Self-linking and self-linked rates of academic institutions on the Web," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 59(1), pages 29-41, January.
    11. Bar-Ilan, Judit, 2008. "Informetrics at the beginning of the 21st century—A review," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 2(1), pages 1-52.
    12. Zohreh Zahedi & Rodrigo Costas & Paul Wouters, 2014. "How well developed are altmetrics? A cross-disciplinary analysis of the presence of ‘alternative metrics’ in scientific publications," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(2), pages 1491-1513, November.

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